LOOSENING is a double album of five works by award winning composer GRAHAM FITKIN. Each one has the string quartet at its core but every work includes its own additional soloist. The string quartet is a really homogenous group, steeped in history and tradition, in which timbrally similar instruments create a well-honed sound through trusted communication and shared purpose. Each work has clearly defined roles for the two protagonists – quartet and solist. Each piece allows for two perspectives, two distinct approaches to the material and yet each protagonist is affected by the other. Approaches often evolve through the works, perhaps the quartet splits their honed homogeneity to focus more on individual constituents or conversely maybe they subsume the incomer into their group creating a larger group. An album of world premiere recordings: Four of the five works have never been recorded before, and the fifth is a new arrangement (also never recorded). DISTIL won the prestigious Royal Philharmonic Society Prize for Chamber Works in 2015.
Is There Anybody Out There? The Wall Live 1980–81 is the third live album released by Pink Floyd in 2000. It is a live rendition of The Wall, produced and engineered by James Guthrie, with tracks selected from the August 1980 and June 1981 performances at Earls Court in London. The shows involved the construction of a wall on stage throughout the first half of the show. Once complete, members of the band performed in small openings in, atop, in front of, or even behind the wall. The album artwork featured the life-masks of the four band members in front of a black wall; the masks were worn by the "surrogate band"[4] during the song "In the Flesh". "Goodbye Blue Sky" and parts of "Run Like Hell" were taken from the 17 June 1981 show, the very last performance by the four-man Pink Floyd until the 2005 Live 8 concert.